NORN KJOKL

I understand there are more lessons coming soon.

Any chance there can be some mp3s with them? I'd like to be sure what Nynorn is really supposed to sound like.

I am also interested in new lessons when available and mp3 files of what Nynorn sounds like. It would be useful
if the lessons were in both pdf and mp3 similar to the lessons produced by Jonathon Adams and Hjalmar Petersen in Faroese A Language Course for Beginners textbook and accompaning mp3 files. [MOD-EDIT - **Please avoid posting such links on our board**].
Rogapl

Yes, we do plan to do sound files, we even started recording them exactly one year ago, but then the guy who was doing it stopped replying and I've never heard from him again. We'll see what we can do. First I want to complete the lessons and after that the work on sound files will be resumed, depending on the popularity of the lessons of course.

I recorded my own attempt at Exercise 1.1. However, when I tried to attach it to this message (to be critiqued) I got "The extension wav is not allowed."

Any way I can do this?

Hi Brus, nice to hear about your attempt! There was a limit of 256 KB for attachments because of hosting space limitations. I've lifted it to 512 KB. Yes, this is still too little for WAV files, but the best way to go is to encode them into MP3, reducing their size by many times. There's lots of free tools that can do this conversion. I prefer Audacity with Lame Encoder (installed separately). Try to use the MP3 format and we'll see how it's gonna work.

OK, let's see if this works:

http://www.mediafire.com/?rt4bo8ccis7js3g

How's it sound? Long and short vowels as they should be? Anything I'm just wrong about?

Sorry, it's only now that I've managed to listen to your recording. Well, I only can congratulate you on the good job done, except that you sometimes have a long vowel where it should be short, in words like bjårga, bjørg, I'm talking about the radical vowel. In sjalder the last syllable should be more reduced than how you utter it, i.e. all physical energy should be concentrated on the first syllable. In words like these you can even try to make the first consonant in the cluster following the stressed vowel half-long (.), like bjår.ga, bjør.g, sjal.der. But, once again this looks like a pretty good effort. Hope when we've got all our sound files done, it will become even more evident.

Thanks for the comments.

I'm much less certain of this next bit, exercises 2.1 and 2.2. I'm supposed to almost but not quite say llj and nnj? Well, here's my try at it. I think 2.2 is a little better, since I'm used to pre-occluded sounds from Cornish and Manx.

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?74fknacns5fbf69

Well, this time your attempt is not as good as the previous one. I can't hear the palatal pronunciation of ll and nn as llj/nnj and in one case you forget that you're supposed to read words with Foula/Westside pronunciation, i.e. as adl, idl, idni etc.

Speaking of palatalization, I suggest that you listen to this song from Shetland: http://www.shetlanddialect.org.uk/Waitin-for-da-Crane

There's a few occurrences of a slight palatalization of 'n' there, in words like "van" (line 4), "end" (line 7), "kind", "man" (line 9) etc. Hope this recording will help you to master these sounds.